The Catholic Church has hardly stood in the vanguard of the scientific revolution. That makes it all the more remarkable that a major, if sadly understated, part of the legacy of Pope Francis is his encyclical Laudato Si’, which embraces the most advanced science on the climate and biodiversity crises.
And he did not hesitate to call out the origins of these crises in a society driven by consumerist greed. He repeatedly links what he calls the “cry of the earth” to “the cry of the poor”.
He demonstrates a feeling for the wonders of nature that any environmentalist could echo. His personal sense of distress is palpable: “We can feel the desertification of the soil almost as a physical ailment, and the extinction of a species as a painful disfigurement”.
The Irish priest and veteran environmental and human rights campaigner Sean McDonagh, who contributed much of the scientific backbone to the document, has spent most of his life fighting a very lonely battle to convince his superiors and colleagues that the church had an obligation to denounce ecological and economic degradation.
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He was overjoyed to be brought from the far periphery to the centre of Vatican thinking. But he remained far from starry-eyed about the broader church’s capacity to absorb this new teaching. And, inside and outside the Church, the impact of the encyclical remains muted.
One must wonder to what extent this is the inevitable outcome of the toothlessness of the calls to action in the document, especially to the church, where Pope Francis wielded immense ideological and institutional power. Heartfelt eloquence alone won’t change the world.
One can’t help wishing that, just this once, Pope Francis had been a tad more authoritarian. But his call was nonetheless important and part of an international recognition of the climate crisis which is now, worryingly, facing something of a reversal. In this context, we must hope that whoever is elected from the forthcoming conclave is not afraid to take up the environmental baton and build on the legacy of Pope Francis.
